Financial Advisor Success

The Financial Advisor Success podcast brings you real success stories and insights from the most successful financial advisors, and leading industry consultants, about how to take your advisory business to the next level. Get a glimpse of what it's like behind the scenes building a successful advisory business, and how entrepreneurial advisors navigate the inevitable highs, and lows, of growing a firm. Whether you're a new financial advisor trying to get started on the right foot, or an experienced advisor who's hit a wall, we're here to give you the insights and inspiration you need to break through and reach the level of success you want to achieve. Subscribe to the show, and get even more at the leading industry blog Nerd’s Eye View at www.Kitces.com.

As a serial entrepreneur, Steve Lockshin has founded several businesses in the advisory industry. Listen to this week’s episode to learn how he got started as a financial advisor without any experience in the field and how he created and sold a software company without a background in programming.

Steve shares his journey from insurance into financial advising and how he got started. You’ll hear the lessons he’s learned from selling companies, his entrepreneurial successes (and failures), and growing his revenue 100% every year.

Today I’m chatting with Sophia Bera, the founder of Gen Y Planning. Sophia was the subject of a post on Nerd’s Eye View back in 2013 when she was starting her firm. Four years on, she’s bringing home more than $100,000 in revenue and serving about 50 clients on a monthly retainer model.

Sophia’s firm is another example of just how powerful a niche can be. Although peers told her that millennials would be a challenging and non-lucrative group to serve, she quickly found that advisors were lacking, not millennial clients.

In this episode, Sophia breaks down her fee structure and service model. Sophia’s experience with traditional firms, financial startups, and running her own business make her uniquely suited to consulting clients and other financial planners alike on their various options for financial management.

Alan and I co-founded XY Planning Network in 2013, but he had to go through a lot of growth and challenges before he got there. Three years later, Alan firmly believes that being your own boss is safer than letting one person (your boss) be in control of your income.

In this episode, Alan and I talk about his internship with Rick Kahler and subsequent job, during which he learned that being an associate advisor in someone else’s firm wasn’t a good fit.

We then dig into Alan’s transition to entrepreneurship, the practice he started from scratch, and the financial ups and downs of making it happen. He shares his motivation for creating a specific niche for other young financial planners and why he’ll never go back to working for anyone else. We wrap up with some of the growing pains of building a business, and how to make sure being an entrepreneur stays fun amid all the hard work.

In this interview, Eric gives us some background about Austin Asset today and its incredible growth since he joined the firm in 1997. He shares candidly about how he and his mentor John Henry McDonald complemented each other as they navigated the challenges of a growing firm.

While we discuss the nuts-and-bolts of succession planning, we also touch on the oft-ignored emotional aspects of such a transition. Eric also talks about the book he co-wrote on the subject,Success and Succession, which he hopes will make this natural part of the industry less lonely and more navigable for all financial planners.